Jonathan Ochshorn's musings on architecture and music — with occasional forays into other territory

A self-sustaining apple orchard?

In The Timeless Way of Building, Christopher Alexander talks about the “self-sustaining harmony” of a mythical apple orchard in which “the whole system of forces and processes keeps itself going, over and again, without creating extra forces that will tear it down.” He writes about “a garden, where the plants, and wind, and animals are perfectly in balance.” Sounds like a sustainable wonder of nature, with no human intervention necessary:

Consider, for example, a corner of an orchard, where the sun warms the ground, the marrows grow, the bees pollinate the apple blossom, the worms bring air to the soil, the apple leaves fertilize the soil …. This pattern repeats itself, hundreds of times, in a thousand different gardens, and is always a source of life.

But the life of the pattern does not depend on the fact that it does something for “us”—but simply on the self-sustaining harmony, in which each process helps sustain the other processes, and in which the whole system of forces and processes keeps itself going, over and again, without creating extra forces that will tear it down.1

On the other hand, C.J. Walke outlines the actual “processes” that need to be attended to, year after year, in order that such organic products actually survive: